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Riding on the City of New Orleans Illinois Central Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail
All along the southbound odyssey the train pulls out at Kankakee
And rolls along past houses farms and fields
Passing trains that have no name and freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles

Good morning, America. How are you?
Say, don’t you know me? I’m your native son
I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans
Give me five one hundred miles to get the big job done

Dealing cards with the old men in the club car
Penny a point, but I’m still keeping score
Toss the paper bag that holds the bottle
I’m feeling the rails rumbling ‘neath the floor
And the sons of Pullman porters and the sons of engineers
Have lost their fathers’ carpet made of steel
Mothers with babes unborn seeking out a steady beat
And I feel the wheels beneath my feet

Good morning, America. How are you?
Don’t you know me? I’m your native son
I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans
Give me five one hundred miles to get the big job done

Night time on the City of New Orleans changing cars in Washington DC
Halfway home we can make it there by morning
Though the Jewish darkness covering like the sea
And all the towns and people seem to fade into a bad dream
The steel rails have surely heard the news
The conductor sings a sad lament, the passengers still have the scent
Though the train purrs a disappearing blues

Yet…Good morning, America. How are you?
Say, don’t you know me? I’m your native son
I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans
Give me five one hundred miles to get the big job done

There are other publications and writers from the late 1800s to early 1900s mentioned as well.

Evidently Jewish Nationalism was a major initiative since the 1600s, as well as the book “History of ZIonism 1600-1918″ written by Nahum Sokolow in 2 volumes written for Barron Rothschild and Theodore Herzl.

Bravo and God bless you, dear +BN, for another outstanding Video and cover of the late Steve Goodman’s great folk song.

He was born in 1948 in Chicago, raised in a Midwest middle-class Jewish home, and was of the early cohorts of Baby Boomers who hadn’t been raised in the post-Auschwitz theology and $hoah indoctrination.

I remember you saying that growing up, no one spoke about a “holocaust” on the scale of “6 million Jews who perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz”, but simply that hundreds of thousands of Jews perished in the calamity of WWII along with the millions of other casualties

My first brush with $hoah indoctrination was in 1971 in college, and the English 1A teacher ran a documentary film with old WWII military footage showing the piles of corpses that succumbed from typhus, and the dramatic shots of the brick crematoria, and other scenes.

That was the first time I’d heard of the so-called “Final Solution,” and the first thing which occurred to me at the time was that the so-called documentary was shocking, but also emotionally manipulative. There was absolutely no warning what the content would be.

The English 1A instructor was into student journaling, and he wanted us to express our emotions regarding the film he’d run in class.

I was irritated by the exercise, and wrote that I thought the entire thing was about “playing head games” with the class. In retrospect, it was only about 4 years after the 1967 Israeli-Arab War.

I see know that it was the beginnings of the Zionization of Main Street America after Israel-worshiping L. B. Johnson’s administration pushed US foreign policy over into the pro-Israel camp from what was originally a neutral foreign policy between the Arab and Israeli world, and Kennedy had actual Arabists and Orientalists advising him.

So Steve Goodman had a real heart for America, and I think he had a pretty good thumb on the pulse of Middle America from his folk music.

He was very much like conservative Jewish kids I’d grown up with in California, who thought of themselves as Americans first, Californians second, and Jews third.

He died of leukemia in 1984, having spent most of his musical life as writer and performer while in treatment for it, meaning much physical pain and misery. Goodman knew he was living on borrowed time, and he made the best of it.

It was about the same time that another American folk poet, Don McLean, wrote “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” which came out in 1971. His eight-minute-long “rock and roll American dream” became an anthem for an entire generation’s 50s innocence, the turbulent 60s, and 70s disillusion - and we memorized every line.

Riding On the City of New Orleans has the same sort of bittersweet tone with melancholy notes.

I believe Goodman, because he was in such grueling treatment for leukemia and still kept on going, was already sensitive more than others to the early decay and hollowing out of American life which had already set in, particularly in the Steel Belt and the industries of the Mid-West.

Goodman wrote his song when the City of New Orleans train was still owned and operated by the Illinois Central Railroad. The railroad company’s slogan described the railroad quite well, “The Main Line of Mid-America”

It was one of only a very few railroads to serve markets with north-south running main lines and not the traditional east-west movements.

What made its routing even more odd was that it served Midwestern markets that likewise traditionally moved goods east and west, such as Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans.

The City of New Orleans run was also the train taken by America’s songwriters, musicians, singers and poets for over 100 years. As Amtrak, which took over the line, writes:

Over 900 Miles between Chicago and New Orleans

Your journey on the City of New Orleans takes you through the heart of our nation’s musical heritage — from Chicago with its world-class Chicago Symphony Orchestra and still vibrant electric blues scene, to Beale Street in Memphis.

Then, travel the history-laden musical crossroads of Mississippi to New Orleans — the birthplace of jazz.

You’ll be riding in the shadows of giants of American music like Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Elvis Presley.”

America’s great railroads, locomotive and train manufacturers, which of course depended greatly on the steel industry, were the first to give way and go into decline, finally pushed aside by the auto and petroleum industry.

Goodman, the all American Jewish poet and part of our national musical heritage, loved the “Main Line of Mid America” train run, he must have taken the City of New Orleans many times for performances.

While the Illinois Central’s pullman-status Panama Limited was all about style and class, the railroad’s coach-only status City of New Orleans was all about speed and comfort, routinely covering 934 miles in just 15 hours and 55 minutes with many station stops on the way.

In his song, Goodman makes melancholic note of the signs of the popular line’s patronage decline which started setting in during the ’60s. I’m old enough to remember when not everyone owned cars, and the sleek, fast silver stream trains would take you anywhere in America.

In 2005, Arlo Guthrie did a major fundraiser using the City of New Orleans train specifically for New Orleans musicians who were devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2004.

Now, the City of New Orleans train, the famous train of America’s poets, musicians, and singers as well as of the Middle America which elected Trump, and other transit services will likely get the ax under Trump’s budget plan.

~~~*~~~

‘Conned’ by Trump: Hundreds of Boeing and Carrier Workers to Lose Their Jobs

“When he spoke at our plant, he acted like no one was going to lose their job.”

In a move that appears to negate President Donald Trump’s numerous vows to fight for American workers at risk of losing their jobs due to corporate outsourcing and layoffs, Boeing told CNN on Thursday that around 200 workers based in South Carolina would be fired in an effort to cut costs.

The layoffs, according to reports, will come from several factories throughout the state, including one Trump visited just a few months ago.

“The South Carolina plant was Trump’s first company visit outside the Beltway after he became president,” the Washington Post noted.

In a memo to employees on Thursday informing them of the layoffs, Joan Robinson-Berry, vice president and general manager of Boeing South Carolina, wrote that “there may be more to come.”

The news comes just as Carrier, another company Trump has frequently criticized for outsourcing, is set to send 600 of its Indianapolis factory jobs to Mexico, a move many view as a direct refutation to Trump’s boasts and a betrayal of his promises.

“The jobs are still leaving,” Robert James, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, told CNBC. “Nothing has stopped.”

T.J. Bray, a long-time Carrier employee who will not lose his job due to seniority, characterized Trump’s promises to workers as more show than substance.

“To me this was just political, to make it a victory within Trump’s campaign, in his eyes that he did something great,” Bray said in an interview with CNBC. “I’m very grateful that I get to keep my job, and many others, but I’m still disappointed that we’re losing a lot.”

In addition to promising workers he would fight for their jobs, Trump also bragged that he convinced Carrier to invest $16 million into the Indianapolis plant.

But, CNBC reported, “United Technologies CEO Greg Hayes [announced] in December that the money would go toward more automation in the factory and ultimately would result in fewer jobs.”

Lawmakers and organizers warned shortly after Trump announced his “deal” with Carrier that it was a facade. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), argued “Carrier just showed corporations how to beat Donald Trump.”

“In exchange for allowing United Technologies to continue to offshore more than 1,000 jobs, Trump will reportedly give the company tax and regulatory favors that the corporation has sought,” Sanders wrote.

“Wow! How’s that for standing up to corporate greed? How’s that for punishing corporations that shut down in the United States and move abroad?”

Chuck Jones, former president of United Steelworkers 1999, similarly characterized Trump’s public proclamations as misleading.

“When he spoke at our plant, he acted like no one was going to lose their job. People went crazy for him,” Jones wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. “All the while, I’m sitting there, thinking that’s not what the damn numbers say.”

“These plants are profitable, and the workers produced a good-quality product,” Jones concluded. “Because of corporate greed, though, company leaders are racing to the bottom, to find places where they can pay the least. It’s a system that exploits everyone.”

We should never forget that Israhell, in both its Jewish nation-state and diaspora nation-within-a-nation transnational configuration, would not hesitate to strike Americans, encourage someone else to do so, or not stand in the way when they have the intelligence that someone will do so, when it suits their purposes.

South Front: Israel Air Force Strikes Syrian Army Artillery Pieces And Battle Tanks In Quneitra Province

The Israeli military announced on Saturday that the Israeli Air Force (IAF) destroyed undefined number of artillery pieces, battle tanks belonging to the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the Syrian province of Quneitra.

The Israeli claimed in a statement that 10 shells fired from the Syrian side had fallen in the [Occupied Syrian Territory] Golan Heights and the airstrikes were a response to this. Hoever, Israel didn’t say that the SAA had fired the shells.

Since the Saturday morning, Al-Bath city in Quneitra has been under an attack from Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and its allies.

Many pro-government source reported that HTS and some Free Syrian Army groups have repeatedly open fire on the Israeli-held territory in order to provoke Israeli military strikes on the SAA .

According to a military source in the Golan Heights, the Israeli Air Force destroyed one tank and one shilka after claiming the Syrian military fired a mortar shell into the occupied areas.

The source told Al-Masdar that the Syrian military did not fire any mortar shells or rockets towards the occupied areas of the Golan Heights, adding that it is an excuse the Israeli forces constantly use to justify their attacks.

People who praise Brother Nathanael but refuse to give him even one dollar, the cost of a cup of coffee, I’m not certain are qualified to go to Heaven. Sorry, but that’s how I feel.

I like the “City of New Orleans” partly because I like trains. Like hoboes jumping from one boxcar to another, we tend to jump from one fad to another.

The latest fad is, of course, to blame White people for everything. But if it wasn’t for White people, there would be no Black millionaires and most Blacks would be living in poverty worse than a hut in Africa next to a crocodile infested river!

The “Black Lives Matter” movement and other Black hate groups sponsored by Jews to destroy the White Christian population of the U.S. with violent crime, drugs and the rape of White females is just more communist Jew filthy trash.

Modern America’s obsession with self and success has killed off what once was an honorable American archetype, the Common Man, who was the nation’s backbone for generations.

America’s Common Man exists no more – gone and forgotten. Once he was lauded as the salt of the earth – our country’s embodiment of what made us special, of what made the great democratic experiment successful, of what made of the United States the magnetic pole for the world’s masses.

Politicians paid their rhetorical respects, poets exalted him in paeans of praise, Aaron Copland composed a “Fanfare for the Common Man” suite. It was an honorable term, an effective shorthand for the Working Man, the Artisan and the Shopkeeper, the clerk.

All now passed from our language and from our consciousness. Instead, we are offered the “hard working middle-class people who pay their taxes, obey the law and worry about their children’s future.” The linguistic dross of the hackneyed stump speech.

Loss of the Common Man is not due to progressive economic realities and a naturally evolving political culture.

More educated Americans are caught in the grip of long-term stagnation than ever before, they have less likelihood of social mobility than ever before, more have every reasonable expectation that their children will be worse off than they are, more are politically marginalized by a party system that serves up a restricted menu of options which effectively disenfranchises 25 percent or so of voters.

The Common Man has lost the attention as well as the concern of the country’s elites. He has been marginalized in every respect but one – he is a sovereign audience for a pop culture that provides a heady brew of distractions.

In that realm of fantasy, he reigns supreme while the serious action which shapes his life takes place elsewhere.

Today, to call a person common is an insult, just as we have degraded the term working class. The connotations are heavily pejorative – they’re failures, they’re losers, they had the American Dream within reach but lacked the will and the spirit to grab it.

It is natural, and just, that they should live out their lives on scant rations. It’s their own fault.

This Victorian ethic grounded in Social Darwinism has now been restored as part of the national creed.

Dressing Up Selfishness

Fitted out in the post-modern fancy dress of market fundamentalist economics, Ayn Randish homilies of narcissistic egomania, and a parade of revivalist Christian sects that mix New Age Salvation with balm for anxious egos, this beggar-thy-neighbor ideology dominates our public discourse.

It has put on the back foot those who still adhere to the enlightened humanism, which propelled progressive thinking and policy for a century.

All this is no accident. Powerful interests have orchestrated a relentless campaign for more than 40 years to reconfigure American life in accord with their reactionary aims and principles.

This is now obvious to anyone who cares to look. The key questions are: why have so few cared to look, and why the ease with which the crusade has won converts, fellow travelers and the acquiescence of the country’s elites.

The distressing truth of our times is that the Common Man has been abandoned by those elites – in politics, in government, in journalism, in professional associations, in academia. The most cursory monitoring of what they do and say – and, equally, what they don’t do and say – makes that manifestly clear.

Personal acquaintance with those elites confirms it. It is a fair generalization that they care little, are preoccupied with their own careers and pastimes, possess only a feeble sense of social obligation, and are smugly complacent.

Money is the common denominator in all of this. But why? These are the people whose material well-being is best protected from the vagaries of a globalized economy, from the predations of big finance and big business. Yes, it is true that they are concerned about preserving their fine houses, sending their children to the top schools, having substantial nest eggs, and enjoying generous health care.

Yes, avarice and moral courage are not compatible human traits.

However, none of their comforts is threatened by public policies that conform to the New Deal consensus which most of them at one time shared (or their parents shared).

In objective terms, the greatest potential threat to their well-being lurks in the plutocratic structures that control our public affairs, the effects of gross and growing income mal-distribution, and the lurch toward mindless Rightest nostrums by both parties.

Escaping Social Responsibility

We should look elsewhere to explain the wholesale flight from responsibility by America’s elites.

Social anthropology offers more insight than does a crude political-economic calculus. At the heart of the matter is status anxiety.

All layers of society struggle with status deprivation or status insecurity.

It is most acute among those whose education and ambition have made them ultra-sensitive to insignia of rank and marks of achievement. They can’t live happily without tangible signs of their having a place that honors their efforts and satisfies their pride.

Money is that tangible sign. It always has been in America where inherited class position never was wholly secure and easily uprooted by the winds of a constant social shuffling.

Americans always have been consumed by an endless, open-ended status competition. That generates anxiety since there is never enough positive status to go around.

Status is a finite commodity as most are destined to find out to their surprise and frustration.

Nowadays, people who see themselves as uncommon winners can’t be bothered by the plight of the Common Man.

What has changed to make the contemporary American so anxiously self-absorbed when placed in historical context?

Above all, there is the deepening of our narcissistic culture. We are now a society where growing numbers recognize no external communal standard to measure and appraise their conduct – or their worth.

The collective superego is shriveled. The self is the only valid pole of reference. That self directs its attention with near exclusivity to its own wants and expectations.

It is almost as if the new categorical imperative is to think of oneself alone whenever and wherever possible. To give priority to any other claim on us is taken as unnatural, i.e. something that has to be justified rather than instinctive or ingrained.

The Godfather’s self-serving plaint that “I did it for my family” is widely adopted as the all purpose excuse for selfish acts of malfeasance or non-commission which, in an earlier time, would be felt by many to be irresponsible – if not downright shameless.

The axial precept “Let humanity be the ultimate measure of all that we do” was the gyroscope for the enlightened social humanism fostered during the second half of the Twentieth Century. It no longer balances and orients us.

Why Not?

Why then not betray a public trust when doing so (seemingly) advances my political ambitions?

Why level with a distressed populace when “America is back!” strikes such a sonorous upbeat note? Why not defer to the latest doomed escalation abroad dear to an incoming President when skepticism endangers funding, access and visibility?

Why not avoid critical columns that expose a naked untruth when the entire political class in going along with the convenient myth that Social Security is part of the Treasury’s budget and a cause of the deficit?

Why not trade in my senior government post for a lavish corporate life style since notions of the collective good and of the public trust are subversive of the individual enterprise that makes this country great?; besides, there’s my family’s financial security to think about.

Why irritate campaign contributors when pulling your punches supposedly means that your well-intentioned self can be kept in office for another two or six years?

Why not conceal from readers the knowledge of systematic civil liberties violations when not printing the truth may give you access to other truths more fit to print?

Why call attention to yourself by teaching the untutored and uninformed of how twisted their nation’s public discourse has become?

Why not be an accomplice to torture when doing so opens a spot at the Pentagon trough for the American Psychological Association?

Why not hide your head in the sand to avoid the discomfort of resisting the assault on the law if you are an officer of a Bar Association?

Why should a law school Dean or senior faculty stick his neck out when the Koch Bros are offering lush funding to establish Law & Economics programs that just happen to promote market fundamentalist principles?

These are the persons who will have to stand up front before the bar of History – because they knew better, should have known better, were expected to know better. …

If I have good reason to sublimate all this, why have I a duty to the Common Man – the ordinary citizen?

My status, my rank, do not depend on it. My financial well-being does not dictate it. To pose the question this way is to anticipate the convenient answer.